If you are a business that works on a project by project basis, and invoices by the project, this new feature for Time Tracker +Billing will be beneficial to ensuring your team is not going over hours. Now you can set up your projects to include estimated time to complete a project based on a total number of hours, or by specific project activities.

How to easily create project estimates

In order to access project estimates you need to create a project for a client. Once you have created a project you can add an estimate by clicking on the hamburger icon and selecting Add/View Estimates from the dropdown. You can choose two ways to create an estimate by total hours or by activity hours.

Creating an estimate “By Hours” will allow you to estimate the total hours it will take to complete the project, and then track time against the total hours. This is good for projects that do not have multiple activities or teams on the project.

Creating an estimate “By Activities” will allow you to set up different activities such as account management, meetings, development, etc. and estimate the time by each activity. This way is good for projects with multiple steps and teams. By tracking the hours by activity you can drill down which part of a project (or team member) is at risk of going over hours.

Project estimate by activities

Select a project start and end date by clicking on the calendar icon. Then click on the dropdown to select an Activity from the list and add the estimated time in the Est. Hours Box. Click on Add Activity. Continue to add all the activities you would like to include in your estimate and when done click on Save.

Once the estimate is created you can now view actual time vs. estimated time, as well as the progress of the project based on days remaining. At any time you can edit or delete the estimate.

Reporting past projects

By setting up estimates on projects and tracking time you will also be able to use this data to do job costing in the future. By having insights on what projects and project activities went over the time allotted, you can now more accurately estimate time, and reduce hours lost to inaccurate estimating.

‍